Sunday, August 31, 2014

Multicultural stabbing in Britain

A gang of youths has been convicted of killing a 'kind and innocent' young man with the mental age of nine in a knife-point mugging caught on graphic CCTV film.

Dean Mayley was stabbed in the heart by 17-year-old Jamal Jones for refusing to hand over his mobile phone to a group of robbers who stopped him as he walked home in Greenford, west London, on the afternoon of February 7.

The 24-year-old had learning difficulties due to a brain disorder called Microcephaly and probably did not fully understand what the teenagers wanted, jurors were told.

Graphic CCTV played out in court captured the moment Jamal Jones, centre, stabbed Dean Mayley right

Jones was found guilty of murder, while his three accomplices were found guilty of manslaughter.

Mayley's mother Donna sat through weeks of harrowing evidence at the Old Bailey and was visibly shocked and tearful after watching footage of the moment her son was fatally injured.

The CCTV showed three shadowy hooded figures go up to Mr Mayley and confront him before one of them lashes out with a blade.

The victim then staggered and collapsed in the road as members of the public rushed to help. He died later in hospital.

The prosecution said while only Jones, from Acton, west London, wielded the knife, all four played a part in the attempted robbery and killing.

Miguel Leiba, also 17, from Hanwell, and Ryan Beresford, 19, blocked the victim's path and Michael Mensah, 18, drove them to and from the scene, the prosecution said.

Beresford, of Acton, and Mensah, of Greenford, along with Leiba denied murder, but were convicted of manslaughter. All three were also found guilty of the attempted robbery of Mr Mayley.

Mensah was found guilty of an earlier robbery on January 28.

Mrs Mayley wept as the verdicts were delivered after around four hours and the defendants wailed in the dock.

By Douglas Carswell (rebel Tory MP, now standing for the seat of Clacton under the UKIP banner)

UKIP's Farage and Carswell above (L to R)

"We plan to change Britain with a sweeping redistribution of power: from the state to citizens; from the government to Parliament; from Whitehall to communities; from Brussels to Britain; from bureaucracy to democracy. Taking power away from the political elite and handing it to the man and woman in the street" -- Conservative party manifesto 2010

Four years on, how has that worked out?

People would be given more power over the political process with a new right to recall their MP, we were told. Somehow the idea got quietly shelved. When the MP for Richmond, Zac Goldsmith, revived the idea earlier this year, government whips swung into action to try to quietly kill his proposals.

Another promise was that of more “localism”. Locally elected councils, not the man in Whitehall, would have more power to decide on planning issues. So why has my local Tendring council in Essex been told by remote bureaucracy to change their local plan so as to accommodate an extra 12,000 new homes?

Britain is still run today much as it was under Tony Blair. A small clique of people sitting on the sofas in Downing Street try to make all the decisions. But because you can’t run a country that way, they end up rushing from one muddle to the next.

Douglas Carswell can see where politics is going – he’s a true moderniser

Strictly speaking, I do not agree with Douglas Carswell’s defection to Ukip. Even with the decline of the two-party system, it is hard for new entrants such as Ukip to achieve depth and breadth. They tend to lead their followers into political cul-de-sacs.

I just said “strictly speaking”, but I do not feel like speaking strictly. My actual reaction to Thursday’s news was one of pleasure. That feeling has not gone away.

I am not alone, I notice. The lack of anger among Conservative-minded people is striking. Traditionally, MPs who switch parties are accused of treachery. Parties have had strong collective identities. Those who leave the tribe have therefore been scorned. Mr Carswell has pre-empted some of this by his decision – virtually unprecedented – to submit his switch of allegiance to a by-election rather than clinging on without asking the voters.

But he also taps into something that is happening anyway. The loyalty and cohesion of political parties depend much more upon their mass memberships than on their elites. For many years now, these have dwindled. Since Tony Blair became Labour leader in 1994, party leaderships have made it a point of honour to ignore or despise their supporters. The natural consequence is that activists become inactive, or change party. Many grassroots Conservatives have already formally gone to Ukip; many more vote for Ukip in council or European elections. They do not see this as disloyal to their beliefs. I predict they will vote for Mr Carswell in his by-election and he will win.

This results from the tragi-comedy of Tory modernisation. When he became leader in 2005, David Cameron was right that his party had to change. He understood it could never succeed if the public mistrusted its motives. The Conservatives had to interest themselves in what mattered to voters, annexing subjects which they had previously ceded to the Left, like health, welfare, the environment and schools.

This went awry. The modernisers’ default position was to identify with the soft-Left producer interest rather than seek reform in the interests of the consumer. Mr Cameron kept praising the NHS, which is actually a terrible organisation, rather than putting himself on the side of delivering the best health care, free at the point of use, for all. Good initiatives such as elected police commissioners went off at half-cock.

Mr Cameron showed a weakness for the political equivalent of botox. How could he and his elderly party be made to look more attractive? Problems with ethnic voters? Get in Sayeeda Warsi – she’s a Muslim woman, isn’t she? Accusations of homophobia? Overthrow, without warning or study, the universal understanding of 2,000 years of Judaeo-Christian civilisation that marriage is something between a man and a woman.

Genuine reform stalled. In his reshuffle in July, Mr Cameron punished policy boldness. He retreated from any fight with the public-sector/quango/NGO “blobs”. He moved Michael Gove from Education, the only area of social policy where his Government had successfully brought change. He sacked the Environment Secretary, Owen Paterson, the one prominent Tory who understands that rural life is a going concern rather than a theme park. He was kicking away his own bulwarks against Ukip.

The pattern of the leader’s actions conveys a message to party workers: they are the problem. Not surprisingly, they tend to leave. Instead of being a renewal, modernisation has become a hollowing out.

Douglas Carswell, by contrast, is authentically a moderniser. In his book The End of Politics, published in 2012, he studied the signs of the times. He argued that “The digital revolution will do to grand planners in the West what the collapse of Communism did to socialist planners in the old Soviet bloc”. “Reform” in the 19th century meant increasing the franchise until it eventually included the entire adult population. In the 21st, it means “iDemocracy”, the crowd-sourcing of politics.

Mr Carswell, and his ally (though non-defector) Daniel Hannan MEP, believe this requires huge changes in parliamentary politics. In the Conservative manifesto at the last election, these ideas got favourable mention. Its very title – ''Invitation to join the Government of Britain’’ – had a Carswellian flavour. An entire chapter called “Change Politics” promised things like the right of “recall” against MPs with whom constituents were dissatisfied, open primaries for choosing candidates, more localism.

Obviously, the ensuing coalition with the Liberal Democrats meant that not all Tory promises could be fulfilled. But many Liberals support changes to open up politics, so something creative could have been forged. Little has happened. Imagine, as a voter, going along to Downing Street and saying, “I should like to take up Mr Cameron’s kind invitation to join the Government of Britain.” You would not get past those famous gates.

The Cameron modernisers made a related mistake about Europe. They said they did not want to “bang on” about it. Of course they were right that people were heartily sick of internal party squabbles, but they ignored the fact that the European Union affects all our lives in countless ways – whom we let in, whom we can throw out, who can make decisions on our behalf, whether we have to deface our country with wind farms, even (this week) how powerful our vacuum cleaners are allowed to be. The Conservatives fought shy of the subject. Now they promise a referendum if they win next year, while intimating that they will settle for minimal demands in the negotiations running up to it. Yesterday – too late – the high command organised a ring-round trying to persuade prominent Eurosceptics to talk the referendum up. Why are they surprised if people do not trust their good faith?

When the SDP got going in the early Eighties, it burst upon the scene with great éclat, because it was set up by famous people. Its problem, however, was that it was never strongly rooted. Eventually it faded. Ukip is almost exactly the other way round: it is a movement of those without power or fame. This makes it hard to run, and it can seem grumpy. But this is how political parties should arise in a democracy. If thousands of people can be galvanised to give their time freely to a cause they passionately believe in, they have something that the mainstream parties have now lost. For all their incoherence, they renew political life. Douglas Carswell saw this earlier than most of his colleagues, long before he thought of defection. The internet age is gradually forcing itself upon our leaders. As he wrote in The End of Politics, it will make them reconnect with voters “less because they see the light, and more because they are beginning to feel the heat”.

The fact that Mr Carswell – a free-market man, whose politics are what he calls “Gladstone.com” – has joined Ukip is a piece of evidence about how the ground is shifting.

Harry Reid is a bigoted Beltway corruptocrat with an interminable case of diarrhea of the mouth. The feeble-minded coot stuck his foot in that mess of a mouth again last week at the Las Vegas Asian Chamber of Commerce. But as mortifying as the Senate Majority Leader is, there's an even worse spectacle: Asian-American liberals who keep giving top Democrats and their partisan operatives blanket passes.

Reid clumsily offered his assessment of the success and intelligence of business leaders of Asian descent at the gathering. "I don't think you're smarter than anybody else, but you've convinced a lot of us you are," he babbled. You put those uppity Asians in their places, Hater Harry!

During a question-and-answer session, Reid followed up his jibe with a crude "joke" about Chinese surnames that would make Archie Bunker cringe: "One problem that I've had today is keeping my Wongs straight."

Good thing the pale-faced codger didn't let a "ching-chong" slip out, too. You know it was ringing around between his ears. Mocking Asian monikers is a hanging offense if you're a Republican pol or conservative talk-show host. But it's just a meaningless gaffe by "diversity's" best friend when you're Democratic Senate Majority Leader.

That's why Reid's hosts obliged with subdued tittering. National news anchors selectively averted their gazes. The Asian American Journalists Association, so quick to issue sanctimonious guidelines for avoiding ethnic stereotypes, maintained radio silence. And the usual left-wing speech police who read racism into every word uttered by conservatives from "angry" to "Chicago" to "Constitution" to "Obamacare" saw and said nothing.

One bizarre group, Asian Pacific American Advocates, was only offended because they resent public attention paid to successful Asian Americans. They vented that Reid "falsely assumes that our communities continue to perpetuate the model minority stereotype, when we have been actively working to highlight the vast socioeconomic disparities within our communities." These confused people have spent way too much time in social justice 101 classes.

Back in Washington, D.C., the usually garrulous Democratic chairwoman of the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus (CAPAC), Rep. Judy Chu, responded by ... not responding at all. CAPAC Executive Director Krystal Ka'ai did not return my email seeking reaction to the race-mocking Senate Majority Leader, who has now apologized for his "extremely poor taste."

Chu and her ethnic grievance caucus — which pledges to "denounce racial and religious discrimination affecting Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders" — did find time over the past year to:

—attack a Seattle theater production of The Mikado for its use of "exaggerated Asian stereotypes."

Last year, left-wing super-PAC Progress Kentucky tweeted multiple China-bashing messages insinuating that Chao, the Taiwanese-American wife of GOP Sen. Mitch McConnell, was part of some conspiratorial plot to move jobs to Asia. The Progress Kentucky xenophobes denied engaging in race-baiting. But the dog whistle — dog trumpet — had been sounded, and the liberal racist hits keep on coming.

Earlier this month, Kathy Groob, a "progressive" supporter of McConnell's Democratic opponent, Alison Grimes, repeatedly insulted Chao on social media as his "Chinese wife." She's "not from KY, she is Asian," fumed Groob. You won't be surprised to learn that Groob had complained copiously about "sexism" and "racism" by the tea party.

When will doormat minorities grow spines and stop protecting the progressives of pallor who denigrate them? Collectivism is a hard, cowardly habit to break.

A SENIOR leader of radical Sydney-based Islamic organisation al-Risalah has denounced the Australian flag, as the group’s supporters posted Facebook messages about ­beheading “non-believers”.

Wissam Haddad, the head of the al-Risalah Islamic Centre in Sydney’s southwest, yesterday told The Daily Telegraph he followed the “flag of Allah” rather than the flag of Australia.

The flag, called the Shahada, is the same as the one used by Islamic State terrorists who have been spreading death and terror across the Middle East.

“For me to have the Shahada flag, as it’s called, that’s a flag that I stand and live and die for and I don’t stand and live and die for the Australian flag.”

It is frequently found on modern Islamic flags and over the last few decades has been adopted by Islamic insurgents.

Mr Haddad, who has ties to Sydney men fighting with Islamic State terrorists in Iraq and Syria, avoids appearing in public and never allows his photograph to be taken.

He said his group was entitled to fly the ancient symbol. He cited the “genocide of Aboriginals” and the use of their flag as justification for supporting the Shahada.

Mr Haddad, who was not invited to join a group of Muslims for talks with Mr Abbott yesterday, has had eight social media accounts shut down, forcing him to rename his profile. He claims Muslims are being unfairly targeted both by Facebook and Twitter.

“I know a lot of people (who have had to shut down and restart their accounts),” he said. “Pretty much anyone very outspoken is getting their accounts shut down.”

In the past week, al-Risalah followers have posted messages about beheading, in the wake of the shocking image of Sydney terrorist Khaled Sharrouf’s son holding the severed head of a Syrian soldier.

This followed fellow terrorist and former Sydney boxer Mohamed Elomar posting similar photographs on Twitter. Al-Risalah members wear black supporter vests, which sell for $65.

The al-Risalah centre has hosted radical preachers, and Mr Haddad is a supporter of the Islamic State’s “Jizyah” protection tax on Christians and Jews in Syria and Iraq.

Also yesterday, teenage Muslim extremist Sulyman Khalid, who was arrested for an alleged hate crime against a Bankstown cleaner, has been released on bail. Mr Khalid, who calls himself Abu Bakr, will front Bankstown Local Court on September

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of other countries. The only real difference, however, is how much power they have. In America, their power is limited by democracy. To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges. They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did: None. So look to the colleges to see what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way. It would be a dictatorship.

Friday, August 29, 2014

Mainline Christianity today

Rotherham: In the face of such evil, who is the racist now?

Let’s start with a riddle. If South Yorkshire Police can mount a raid on Sir Cliff Richard’s home in pursuit of evidence linked to a single allegation of child sex abuse 30 years ago, why were South Yorkshire Police incapable of pursuing multiple allegations against multiple men who raped 1,400 children over 16 years?

One thousand four hundred. Consider the weight of that number, feel its tragic heft. Picture 50 junior-school classes of little girls in Rotherham, once a respectable northern town, now a byword for depravity. We have seen child-grooming cases before, but the disgusting stories revealed in the report by Professor Alexis Jay amount to evidence of abuse on an industrial scale.

Men of Pakistani heritage treated white girls like toilet paper. They picked children up from schools and care homes and trafficked them across northern cities for other men to join in the fun. They doused a 15-year-old in petrol and threatened to set her alight should she dare to report them. They menaced entire families and made young girls watch as they raped other children.

These truly horrible things happened in our country – not in the distant, cruel past, but as recently as last year. All but one of the perpetrators were Muslims of Pakistani heritage who would have related to Cliff’s hit, Living Doll.

The living dolls of Rotherham were bent and twisted to their masters’ will. There was no escape. As the sterling Professor Jay observes, South Yorkshire Police “regarded many child victims with contempt”.

One 11-year-old known as Child H told police that she and another girl had been sexually assaulted by grown men. Nothing was done. When she was 12, Child H was found in the back of a taxi with a man who had indecent pictures of her on his phone. Despite the full co-operation of her father, who insisted his daughter was being abused, police failed to act. Four months later, Child H was found in a house alone with a group of Pakistani men. What did the police do? They arrested the child for being drunk and disorderly and ignored her abusers. As President Obama said about the fiends who beheaded the journalist James Foley: “No just God would stand for what they did.”

My, what the British people would give to hear such ringing moral condemnation from our own political leaders.

The Labour Party, in particular, is mired in shame over “cultural sensitivity” in Rotherham. Especially, cynics might point out, a sensitivity to the culture of Muslims whose votes they don’t want to lose. Denis MacShane, MP for Rotherham from 1994 to 2012, actually admitted to the BBC’s World At One yesterday that “there was a culture of not wanting to rock the multicultural community boat, if I may put it like that. Perhaps, yes, as a true Guardian reader and liberal Leftie, I suppose I didn’t want to raise that too hard.” Much better to hang on to your impeccable liberal credentials than save a few girls from being raped, eh, Denis?

Equally horrifying is the suggestion that certain Pakistani councillors asked social workers to reveal the addresses of the shelters where some of the abused girls were hiding. The former deputy leader of the council, Jahangir Akhtar, is accused of “ignoring a politically inconvenient truth” by insisting there was not a deep-rooted problem of Pakistani-heritage perpetrators targeting young white girls. The inquiry was told that influential Pakistani councillors acted as “barriers to communication” on grooming issues.

Front-line youth workers who submitted reports in 2002, 2003 and 2006 expressing their alarm at the scale of the child sex-offending say the town hall told them to keep quiet about the ethnicity of the perpetrators in the interests of “community cohesion”.

Fear of appearing racist trumped fears of more children being abused. Not only were negligent officials not prosecuted, they prospered. Shaun Wright, a former Labour councillor who was in charge of Rotherham children’s services during a five-year period when a blind eye was turned to the worst case of mass child abuse in British history, is now South Yorkshire’s Police and Crime Commissioner. Oh, Jonathan Swift, thou shouldst be writing at this hour!

Jane Collins, the Ukip MEP for Yorkshire and Humber, has called for Mr Wright to stand down, a demand that has been echoed by Labour as it realises the full horror of what was done – or not done – by its councillors. “To cover up something of this scale, it is evil,” says Mrs Collins.

It’s impossible not to share that incredulous fury. Powerless white working-class girls were caught between a hateful, imported culture of vicious misogyny on the one hand, and on the other a culture of chauvinism among the police, who regarded them as worthless slags. Officials trained up in diversity and political correctness failed to acknowledge what was effectively white slavery on their doorstep. Much too embarrassing to concede that it wasn’t white people who were committing racist hate crimes in this instance.

The whole thing is like a real-life episode of Prime Suspect, in which councillors, the police and child-protection staff collude to give a bunch of sadistic thugs licence to pimp a town’s most vulnerable children. As they say in Yorkshire: “They want shooting, the lot of them.”

This will come as no comfort to the 1,400 brutalised girls, many of whom have self-harmed or committed suicide, but I reckon Rotherham may be the final nail in the coffin of multiculturalism. Far from discouraging racism, the Labour policy of withholding the ethnic identity of men who preyed on white girls backfired spectacularly. Criminally, it endangered hundreds of children who might otherwise have been spared. A recent poll showed that 44 per cent of young Britons believe that Muslims do not share the same values as the rest of the population, while 28 per cent said they felt Britain would be “better off” with fewer Muslims.

Attitudes are even more negative among older people. A recent Radio 4 item about how junior jihadists spending their gap year massacring people in Iraq could be “reintegrated” into British society produced hoots of derision on social media and spilt tea across the breakfast tables of England. (Hands up anyone who wants the blighters back?) The period of giving the benefit of the doubt to young Muslims who go on “camping holidays” to Syria is over. Undoubtedly, the fact that “Jihadi John”, the hooded man who was party to the beheading of James Foley, spoke with a London accent has provoked further despair about the widespread failure of Muslims to integrate. Has it really come to this? A child raised with all the freedoms and blessings of a British upbringing behaving like a natural-born barbarian.

My colleague Boris Johnson’s excellent suggestion that any Britons who travel to Syria and Iraq without informing the authorities should be presumed to be potential terrorists until proven innocent produced howls of outrage from the human rights brigade – but it struck an entire symphony of chords with Britons of all creeds and colours who are sick of being taken for mugs.

There are other hopeful signs. The Rotherham scandal seems temporarily to have silenced those who insist, every time a child-grooming case is exposed, that most paedophiles are white. Indeed they are; but the Rotherham abusers were not paedophiles. They were men of Pakistani heritage slaking their lust on young girls they regarded as white trash because they knew they could get away with it. It grieves me to say they were right. Like South Yorkshire Police, they treated 1,400 defenceless children “with contempt”.

On Channel 4 News on Tuesday, Javed Khan, the chief executive of Barnardo’s, refused to give a straight answer to a question about the part that “ethnicity” played in the abuse of girls in Rotherham. As the presenter Jackie Long persisted, Mr Khan insisted that we should not be focusing on the identity of the perpetrators because it “distracted attention” from the children who were their victims.

On the contrary. It is of the utmost importance that wider society wakes up to the fact that there is what the inquiry found to be a “deep-rooted problem of Pakistani-heritage perpetrators targeting young white girls”. Many of us who have been saying this for a long time have been shouted down as racist. Thanks to Prof Jay, it has been stated publicly for the first time that the fear of appearing racist was more pressing in official minds than enforcing the law of the land or rescuing terrified children. It is one of the great scandals of our lifetime.

The Labour council of Rotherham stands accused of ignoring child sex abuse on an unimaginable scale for 16 years. There can be no more serious charge against a public body. Former councillors who dismissed evidence or otherwise attempted to pervert the course of justice should be arrested. Officers who snubbed appeals from desperate children and their families have no place in our police force.

Thus far, a mere five men have been jailed in connection with the disgusting crimes in Rotherham. A further 30 are under investigation. We need a campaign to get other abused children to come forward and receive the appropriate help. We need them to identify the perpetrators. Shame and name, and shame again. Above all, we need those girls to know that what was done to them was criminal, and the way those crimes were ignored and suppressed by powerful men with a political agenda was despicable as well as criminal. To avoid rocking the multicultural boat, they fed 1,400 children to the sharks. No just God would stand for what they did.

The woman who presided over the last five years of failure as the boss of children’s services at Rotherham Council is the same executive who removed three children from their foster parents because they were Ukip voters.

Joyce Thacker, the £130,000-a-year Strategic Director of Children’s Services at the scandal-hit council, is among the senior managers who are now under pressure to resign following the “excoriating” report into child sexual exploitation in the town.

Although she is not named as being culpable for the failure to protect 1,400 abused children in the report, as the head of children’s services since 2008 Mrs Thacker is among those whose positions now appear to be under threat.

The report by Professor Alexis Jay said child sexual exploitation had carried on largely unchecked between 1997 and 2013, the period she was asked to examine, but “continues to this day”.

Nick Gibb, the Education Minister, said on Wednesday that those who made policy decisions that contributed to the scandal “should be held to account”.

Mrs Thacker, who joined the Council as deputy head of children’s services in 2006, is already a controversial figure following her decision two years ago to remove three ethnic minority children from their foster parents because of their affiliation to Ukip.

After The Telegraph drew attention to the foster parents’ plight, Mrs Thacker refused to back down, saying the children’s “cultural and ethnic needs” did not fit in with the parents’ “strong views”. She said their support for Ukip meant they opposed “multiculturalism”.

Last year, during an appearance before Parliament’s Home Affairs Select Committee to give evidence on child grooming in Rotherham she told MPs: “I do not think I would fully accept that we have failed dismally to deal with the issue.”

When asked why there had been so few people brought to justice for child sexual exploitation in Rotherham, she replied: “Prosecution is the icing on the cake.”

Mrs Thacker lives with her husband in a four-bedroomed house in Shipley, West Yorkshire.

An appeals court on Wednesday overturned the hate-crime convictions of 16 Amish defendants in beard- and hair-cutting attacks on fellow members of their faith.

The ruling by the Sixth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals means the case will return to the U.S. District Court in Cleveland and federal Judge Dan Polster.

The 10 men and six women, who were sentenced Feb. 8, 2013 in federal court in Cleveland, had appealed their convictions. The five cutting attacks on a total of nine victims took place between September and November 2011.

The defendants challenged the constitutionality of the federal hate-crimes act as overly broad, a claim rejected by Polster in 2012 before the trials began.

Ringleader Samuel Mullet Sr. was sentenced to 15 years and the co-defendants, all members of his extended family, got sentences of one year to seven years.

A jury convicted them of attacks in apparent retaliation against Amish who had defied or denounced Mullet's authoritarian style.

The court said the jury received incorrect instructions about how to weigh the role of religion in the attacks.

"When all is said and done, considerable evidence supported the defendants' theory that interpersonal and intra-family disagreements, not the victims' religious beliefs, sparked the attacks," the ruling said.

The focus of the trial centered on Mullet, leader of a breakaway Amish sect in Bergholz, Ohio, where about 20 Amish families live on his 880-acre farm. The community is about 100 miles southeast of Cleveland near the West Virginia border.

"I am being blamed for being a cult leader," Mullet said at the February 2013 sentencing. "If somebody needs to be punished, I'll take the punishment for everybody."

In addition to the conspiracy charge, Mullet was convicted last year on six additional counts, including lying to the FBI, for planning the attacks, which were likened to animals being shorn.

During the trial, prosecutors and witnesses in U.S. District Court in Cleveland described how Mullet's sons pulled a father out of bed and chopped off his beard in the moonlight and how women followers of Mullet surrounded their mother-in-law and cut off 2 feet of her hair, taking it down to the scalp in some places.

The defense had said there was insufficient evidence linking Mullet to the hair-cutting.

"Stretching conspiracy law beyond its limits, the government argued that, as Bishop of the Bergholz community, Mullet could have stopped the hair cuttings but failed to do so, rendering him liable for others' actions," Mullet's attorney said in a November court filing.

Some of the defendants who received the shortest sentences have served that time and already returned to their community.

Hair and beards have enormous religious symbolism for the Amish, and the government portrayed the attacks as hate crimes. The defense admitted the cuttings took place but characterized the incidents as a family feud.

A TERRIFIED woman who was chased by two would-be rapists along two trains in a 10km escape says she feared for her life.

The woman, identified as Merlyn, claims two men ­approached her at Wolli Creek station at 11pm on Tuesday night, calling her “babe” and trying to grab her, before she escaped by jumping on to an outgoing train.

Thirty minutes and 9.4km later at Beverly Hills, the scared 29-year-old was forced to fend off one of the same ­attackers with her umbrella outside Beverly Hills station when the attack escalated.

She said the terrifying ­ordeal started at Wolli Creek as one of the two men followed her down the stairs to a ­platform. After switching trains at Turrella and getting off near her home at Beverly Hills around 30 minutes later, she was terrified when she saw the same two men get off the train and again follow her.

Still visibly upset 12 hours after the alleged incident yesterday, Merlyn said she tried to fend off one of the men with her umbrella as he chased her down the middle of King ­Georges Rd in pouring rain while she screamed for help.

Later she was attacked again at Beverly Hills station, but managed to beat them off with

Later she was attacked again at Beverly Hills station, but managed to beat them off with her umbrella. Picture: Toby Zerna

With no one stopping to help Merlyn said she feared she would be killed or raped until a woman named “Helen” whisked her to safety in her car. “If not I don’t know what would have happened,” she said. Merlyn, who migrated from the Philippines eight years ago and has a four-year-old son, said she believed the pair were going to abduct and sexually assault her.

Merlyn said both men were aged 18 to 22 and of African ­appearance. One was skinny with curly hair, the other was fat. Police are investigating.

With a reputation for atrocities somewhere between Pol Pot and Idi Amin, nonagenarian and self-styled illegitimate Zimbabwean President Mugabe has been slaughtering white farmers in a sanctioned land grab and keeping his 14 million inhabitants starving and diseased while he occupies grandiose palaces... one for each day of the week.

Miniature megalomaniac Mugabe tortures and murders his political opponents and refuses to accept election results. A quarter million whites have either been ruthlessly murdered or have fled this worst of all regimes. Pockets of whites now number fewer than 20,000.

South of this landlocked diamond-rich country, apartheid reigned supreme under P. W. Botha. The world isolated him with vicious sanctions, they refused him recognition and no sporting teams, including rugby and cricket teams were permitted to contest with South Africa until, after 40 years, apartheid was dismantled.

Why am I saying this? Well in a desperate attempt to avoid the ABC’s Q&A last night I channel-flicked to the Australian cricket team playing Zimbabwe in Harare.

Of course the second grade Zimbabweans were thrashed by 198 runs but a question lingered: Why the hell are we giving this foulest of regimes credibility by competing with it? Not a placard of protest was to be seen in the small crowd.

Does the normally noisy Left excuse a black regime's persecution of whites in this, a perverted form of reverse apartheid?

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of other countries. The only real difference, however, is how much power they have. In America, their power is limited by democracy. To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges. They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did: None. So look to the colleges to see what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way. It would be a dictatorship.

Thursday, August 28, 2014

VA Sued for Denying Benefits to Gay Spouses

A law firm representing gay and lesbian service members and veterans on Tuesday filed suit against the Veterans Affairs Department for failing to extend benefits to same-sex spouses who live in states that do not recognize their marriages.

"Gay and lesbian veterans have served their country and risked the ultimate sacrifice to fulfill their duty to this nation," said Susan Sommer, director of Constitutional Litigation at Lambda Legal of New York City. "No member of our community should be left behind just because their home state continues to discriminate against their marriage."

The VA should not rely on state marriage bans that the high court already has declared unconstitutional as the basis to deny spousal benefits, the suit contends.

Lambda, along with the Morrison and Foerster LLP firm of Washington, DC, and San Diego, California, argue that the benefits denial violates the U.S. Supreme Court's decision striking down the Defense of Marriage Act in June 2013.

The legal teams filed the suit on behalf of the American Military Partner Association, a non-profit support network for lesbian, gay, bi-sexual and transgender military personnel and their families.

The VA currently does not grant benefits to spouses of gay veterans if the couple were married in, or -- at the time they accrued benefits -- living in a state that does not recognize same-sex marriages, according to the lawsuit.

The suit also claims the VA is refusing to extend such benefits even though it had previously conceded that "the exclusion of legally married same-sex couples from veterans' benefits is not rationally related to any military interest or other identified governmental purpose."

Currently, 19 states and the District of Columbia recognize same-sex marriage.

The denied benefits include pension, survivors benefits, and home loan guarantees.

Stephen Peters, president of AMPA and a Marine veteran married to an active duty Marine, said it is "unacceptable to see [association] members not only discriminated against in their home states where their marriages are disrespected, but also turned down by the federal government for basic veterans benefits for their spouses."

In the active-duty military, same-sex spouses receive the same benefits regardless of whether the state they live in recognize their marriage.

More than 1,400 children were sexually abused during a period of over 16 years by gangs of paedophiles after police and council bosses turned a blind eye for fear of being labelled racist, a damning report has concluded.

Senior officials were responsible for “blatant” failures that saw victims, some as young as 11, being treated with contempt and categorised as being “out of control” or simply ignored when they asked for help.

In some cases, parents who tried to rescue their children from abusers were themselves arrested. Police officers even dismissed the rape of children by saying that sex had been consensual.

Downing Street last night described the failure to halt the abuse in Rotherham, South Yorkshire, as “appalling”.

Following the publication of the report, the leader of Rotherham council, Roger Stone, resigned, but no other council employees will face disciplinary proceedings after it was claimed that there was not enough evidence to take action.

There were calls for Shaun Wright, the Police and Crime Commissioner for South Yorkshire, to step down after it emerged that he was the councillor with responsibility for children’s services in Rotherham for part of the period covered by the report.

Details of the appalling depravity in the town and the systemic failures that allowed it to continue were laid out in a report published by Professor Alexis Jay, the former chief inspector of social work in Scotland. Victims were gang raped, while others were groomed and trafficked across northern England by groups of mainly Asian men.

When children attempted to expose the abuse, they were threatened with guns, warned that their loved ones would be raped and, in one case, doused in petrol and told they would be burnt alive.

Prof Jay wrote: “No one knows the true scale of child sexual exploitation in Rotherham over the years. Our conservative estimate is that approximately 1,400 children were sexually exploited over the full inquiry period, from 1997 to 2013.

“It is hard to describe the appalling nature of the abuse that child victims suffered. They were raped by multiple perpetrators, trafficked to other towns and cities in the north of England, abducted, beaten, and intimidated.”

She added: “There were examples of children who had been doused in petrol and threatened with being set alight, threatened with guns, made to witness brutally violent rapes and threatened they would be next if they told anyone.”

The report pinned the blame squarely on failings within the leadership of South Yorkshire Police and Rotherham council.

Prof Jay said: “Within social care, the scale and seriousness of the problem was underplayed by senior managers. At an operational level, the police gave no priority to child sex exploitation, regarding many child victims with contempt and failing to act on their abuse as a crime.”

It emerged that there had been three previous reports into the problem which had been suppressed or ignored by officials, either because they did not like or did not believe the findings.

Yesterday’s report concluded that by far the majority of perpetrators were Asian men, and said council officials had been unwilling to address the issue for fear of being labelled racist.

The report stated: “Some councillors seemed to think it was a one-off problem, which they hoped would go away. Several staff described their nervousness about identifying the ethnic origins of perpetrators for fear of being thought racist; others remembered clear direction from their managers not to do so.”

For years, the police failed to get a grip of the problem, dismissing many of the victims as “out of control” or as “undesirables” who were not worthy of police protection.

The report was commissioned by Rotherham council following the conviction in 2010 of five men who were given lengthy jail terms after being found guilty of grooming teenage girls for sex.

Police said they are currently dealing with 32 live investigations into child sexual exploitation in Rotherham and in the past 12 months 15 people have been prosecuted or charged.

Other similar high-profile cases followed in towns and cities including Rochdale, Derby and Oxford.

Last night a No 10 spokesman said: “The failings of local agencies exposed by this inquiry are appalling.

“We are determined that the lessons of past failures must be learned and that those who have exploited these children are brought to justice.”

John Cameron, of the NSPCC, said: “This report is truly damning and highlights consistent failures to protect children from sexual abuse at the hands of predatory groups of men.

“It appears there was at a senior level a collective blindness over many years to the suffering of children who endured almost incomprehensible levels of violence and intimidation. Many of these children were already extremely vulnerable and the manner in which they were let down by agencies entrusted to protect them is appalling. It is quite astonishing that even when front-line staff raised concerns these were not acted upon so allowing devastating child sexual exploitation to go unchallenged.”

Responding to the criticism levelled at the police, Chief Superintendent Jason Harwin, the district commander for Rotherham, issued an unreserved apology to all the victims of child sexual exploitation (CSE).

“We have completely overhauled the way in which we deal with child sexual exploitation and that’s been recognised in the report and by Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary earlier this year,” he said.

He added: “I accept that our recent successes in tackling CSE will not heal the pain of those victims who have been let down but we continue to deal with historic investigations with great success and will continue to thoroughly investigate any new evidence available to us.

“Our staff will relentlessly go wherever the evidence takes them and do everything they can with partners to identify offenders and bring them to justice.”

Children threatened with legal action for playing outside their homes because housing chiefs say it's 'dangerous and anti-social'

That was normal behaviour when I was a kid

Families have reacted with fury after a housing association tried to ban their children from playing outside their homes.

Residents of a suburban cul-de-sac in Worcester were left stunned when housing chiefs sent them a letter complaining about youngsters on bikes and scooters.

They now fear legal action if they allow children to venture outside during the school summer holidays.

Four families living in suburban Wensleydale Drive received letters from Nexus Housing last week telling them that children should not be playing in an area next to their homes.

Grandmother Carol Stanford, 53, who received one of the warning letters, said: 'I regularly look after my grandchildren, three-year-old Leah and Stacey, who is six.

'I'm happy for them to play in the area next to my home which is sometimes used for cars to turn around. 'But I received a letter from Nexus Housing claiming complaints had been made. I am livid.' She added: 'When I was a child, everybody used to play in the street. There's no room in my garden for them to play skipping games so this is ideal. 'It's safe and they're with friends. I called Nexus and someone told me the matter may be taken further. They said it was a health and safety issue.'

Another parent, Emma Turner, 26, has also received a letter from Nexus claiming to have received complaints about her two daughters, Ruby Jane, six, and Evie Lee, two. She said: 'It's stupid. Everyone is really friendly around here and they watch out for the kids. Nexus told me to keep my kids out of the area.'

"Not all Republicans are racist, but all racists are Republicans," said almost every die-hard American liberal/progressive since the 1960s.

This offensive and disgraceful smear is a conversation ender that the American left has dispatched countless times when debating their political opposition, even on issues totally unrelated to race. It's also a phrase casually bantered about in liberal social circles.

The first part of the phrase is meant to soften the blow of the subsequent insult; but, the overall message behind the phrase is clear: Republicans either are racist or tolerate racism.

Calling someone, or an entire group, racist should never be done casually or without careful consideration. It is a deeply hurtful accusation to throw at people who have no overt or subconscious racial bias or prejudice. As Republicans, we pride ourselves on toughness and not allowing ourselves to be easily offended. In this case, we can not allow such slander to simply slide off our backs.

Engaging in an exercise of social division, condescending liberals attempt to paint all Republicans as dumb, racist, sexist, misogynist and uncaring. Each allegation is as offensive as the one before.

I am not suggesting there aren't bigots who wave the Republican banner. However, I am declaring that narrow minded discriminators exist in all political movements and proudly display their allegiance to Democrats as well.

If you don't want to take my word for it, spend an evening at a Teamsters or municipal workers union member meeting. Some of the most disgusting, racist, sexist words I have ever personally heard uttered came from the swearing mouths of hardcore, third generation Chicago union members who have never voted for a Republican in their life and would rather eat dirt than start now.

Such verbal filth doesn't just come from the stereotypical working class guy drinking too many beers with his boys. It also comes in a more subtle form from the mouths of upper, middle income parents who firmly believe in the economic and social policies of liberal Democrats; but, tell their children to lock their doors in the grocery store parking lot when a black teenager walks by.

Racism isn't limited to words, either. Plenty of Chicago's most politically active liberals are the same people I see clutching their purse a little tighter when they walk past a pair of Hispanic men. I notice Chicago's "lakefront liberals" and city employees move to neighborhoods miles from the heart of the city, where almost no non-white families live. Chicago and many other big cities did not have large Republican electorates during the "white flight" years of the 1950s, 60s,70s and early 80s. Even today, Democratic households are moving into the suburbs and you'd have to be naive to think that has no correlation to the movement of non-white residents away from the city center into traditionally western European neighborhoods.

And as for homophobia, some of the ugliest words uttered at gay men come from the pulpits of historically black churches and Hispanic and Irish Catholic Church altars. These Christian church pews are full of generations worth of loyal Democratic voters; yet, they nod along as gay men are called "abominations" who are "condemned to hell."

The hard truth is that racism, sexism, homophobia and intolerance of all types existed and exists in both major American political parties. Unfortunately, the bigots who seem to be the loudest, most embarrassing and best at grabbing the spotlight are Republicans. Sadly, when they spew their intolerant views, there are Democrat voters quietly nodding along with their Republican rivals.

So why do Democrats ignore the racists in their ranks and exploit the presence of racists in ours? Partially because we allow them to and partially because Democrats look for excuses to avoid engaging in real political dialogue.

Republican self pride keeps many of us from expressing how deeply offensive liberal accusations are to us. We don't like to bitch and moan about political correctness or ask our political foes to temper their words. That needs to change. We can not allow slanderous statements like the one I used to start this post go unchecked. Just because someone believes in limited government and maximum individual liberty does not mean he/she is prejudiced or hateful toward any group. Just because someone has a GOP bumper sticker does not mean they have a loaded rifle in the back seat next to a Bible. These are ugly stereotypes, a word the American left supposedly reviles.

Just as with any other group of close minded people, liberals that choose to slander are simply fearful of those whom they do not understand or disagree with. Liberal commentators and comedians alike often choose to throw salacious charges at conservatives simply because they are tired of debating the issues of taxation rates, deficit spending, healthcare reform, government programs, education reform, gun rights or national security among others. If a liberal can't understand why someone, who has had different experiences than their own, would disagree with them on a topic, they simply manufacture and assign a fanatical motive onto their opponent to explain it away.

Both sides name-call and hit below the belt in America's never ending political drama. However, only die hard lefties proclaim themselves free of all bias and prejudice only to turn around and stereotype their opponents. They bestow upon themselves a position of intellectual superiority that allows them to justify their ugly caricaturing of Republicans. Liberal proclamation of "moral superiority" only adds to the smugness inherit in their riffs.

There is no justification for falsely accusing people of things for which they are not guilty.

Bigotry and intolerance is wrong. Racism is wrong. Sexism is wrong. Homophobia is wrong.

So is classifying your political opponent as any of those things as a cheap way out of a real discussion.

There are real villains in the world who hold deeply prejudiced views. Let's reserve our anger and resentment for them and stop fabricating new social enemies where none exist.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of other countries. The only real difference, however, is how much power they have. In America, their power is limited by democracy. To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges. They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did: None. So look to the colleges to see what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way. It would be a dictatorship.

Wednesday, August 27, 2014

Huge sample size, rigorous analysis. I am normally scornful of extreme quintile analyses but the intermediate quintiles in this study do not appear to be anomalous

In West Side Story Stephen Sondheim set out the theories of juvenile delinquency with more clarity, and certainly more brevity, than the academics who had dreamed them up. A prominent theory in sociological circles is that crime arises from poverty and consequently that the alleviation of poverty by paying social benefits should diminish criminality.

The link between poverty and crime has been demonstrated repeatedly, and recently confirmed for USA and Norway. Repetition of a correlation impacts academic and public opinion. However, as we are wearily cognizant of, correlation is not causation, though in ordinary life it damn well implies it. Correlation is a necessary feature of causation, but not a sufficient proof. The quip should be altered to: correlation is not always causation, but it helps.

This link has been investigated, in a different way, by a gang of sociologists led by Amir Sariaslan (ex-Uppsala) and his colleagues at the great Karolinska in Sweden, the country of Volvo, Saab (RIP), Bofors guns, Primus stoves, interminable Bergman movies, winter candles on the streets of gamla gatan, pacificism, social welfare, and obsessional scandinavian epidemiology. The latter has proved a redeeming feature.

"Childhood family income, adolescent violent criminality and substance misuse: quasi-experimental total population study.

British Journal of Psychiatry. Published online ahead of print August 21, 2014, doi:10.1192/bjp.bp.113.136200

Children of parents in the lowest income quintile experienced a seven-fold increased hazard rate (HR) of being convicted of violent criminality compared with peers in the highest quintile (HR = 6.78, 95% CI 6.23–7.38). This association was entirely accounted for by unobserved familial risk factors (HR = 0.95, 95% CI 0.44–2.03). Similar pattern of effects was found for substance misuse."

The authors point out:

"Behavioural genetic investigations have found that the liabilities for both violent offending and substance misuse are substantially influenced by shared genetic and, to a lesser extent, family environmental factors.7,8

We linked data from nine Swedish, longitudinal, total-population registers maintained by governmental agencies. The linkage was possible through the unique 10-digit civic registration number assigned to all Swedish citizens at birth and to immigrants upon arrival to the country.

We calculated mean disposable family income (net sum of wage earnings, welfare and retirement benefits, etc.) of both biological parents for each offspring and year between 1990 and 2008. Income measures were inflation-adjusted to 1990 values according to the consumer price index provided by Statistics Sweden.

Gender, birth year and birth order were included in all models. We also adjusted for highest parental education and parental ages at the time of the first-born child, and parental history of ever being admitted to hospital for a mental disorder.

The participants entered the study at their fifteenth birthday and were subsequently followed up for a median time of 3.5 years. The maximum follow-up time was 6 years."

This is a short time to pick up the full flowering of criminal careers, so perhaps should be considered and under-estimate, or purely a measure of juvenile delinquency and not of life time criminality (which usually lasts until middle age).

Readers will know that I cast a particularly baleful eye over all “corrections” and “adjustments” but in this paper the techniques are transparent, and have an intrinsic justification. The data allows them to compare siblings with cousins, and intact nuclear families with more scattered ones: two natural experiments which allow contrasts of shared genes and experience. Crafty. That is my summary, but here is their explanation in detail:

We fitted two separate models for the entire sample (n = 526 167) that gradually adjusted for observed confounding variables. Model I adjusted for gender, birth year and birth order, whereas Model II also adjusted for highest parental education, parental ages at the time of the first-born child and parental history of admission to hospital for a mental disorder.

To assess the effects also of unobserved genetic and environmental factors, we fitted stratified Cox regression models to cousin (n = 262 267) and sibling (n = 216 424) samples with extended or nuclear family as stratum, respectively. The stratifiedmodels allow for the estimation of heterogeneous baseline hazard rates across families and thus capture unobserved familial factors. This also implies that exposure comparisons are made within families. Model III was fitted to the cousin sample and adjusted for observed confounders and unobserved within extended-family factors. Model IV was fitted on the sibling sample and accounted for unobserved nuclear family factors and for gender, birth year and birth order.

Cousin and sibling correlations on the exposure variable were calculated based on a varying-intercepts, mixed-effects model where the intercepts are allowed to vary across families.

The magnitude of the variation was expressed as an intra-class correlation (ICC). The ICC measures the degree to which observations are similar to one another within clusters; in this case cousins and siblings nested within extended and nuclear family clusters. The measure ranges between 0 and 1, where the latter implies that cousins and siblings have identical exposure values within families.

As you can see, each model picks away at what would otherwise be seen as a purely economic cause of criminality and drug abuse. Model II which adjusts for parental education and mental illness has a big effect.

In an unusual departure, The Economist devoted an article to this paper, which suggests that they are beginning to wake up to the human factors in economics. Admittedly, they sub-titled it A disturbing study of the link between incomes and criminal behaviour, suggesting they were disturbed. Here are The Economist’s conclusions:

"That suggests two, not mutually exclusive, possibilities. One is that a family’s culture, once established, is “sticky”—that you can, to put it crudely, take the kid out of the neighbourhood, but not the neighbourhood out of the kid. Given, for example, children’s propensity to emulate elder siblings whom they admire, that sounds perfectly plausible. The other possibility is that genes which predispose to criminal behaviour (several studies suggest such genes exist) are more common at the bottom of society than at the top, perhaps because the lack of impulse-control they engender also tends to reduce someone’s earning capacity.

Neither of these conclusions is likely to be welcome to social reformers. The first suggests that merely topping up people’s incomes, though it may well be a good idea for other reasons, will not by itself address questions of bad behaviour. The second raises the possibility that the problem of intergenerational poverty may be self-reinforcing, particularly in rich countries like Sweden where the winnowing effects of education and the need for high levels of skill in many jobs will favour those who can control their behaviour, and not those who rely on too many chemical crutches to get them through the day."

This is only one study, of course. Such conclusions will need to be tested by others. But if they are confirmed, the fact that they are uncomfortable will be no excuse for ignoring them.

What The Economist might have said is: Since this is a total population study of five birth cohorts and is the largest by far in the literature, it has high credibility, and the result will stand until another study of equal quality finds otherwise.

U.S. District Judge Robert Hinkle, sitting in Tallahassee, ruled that the 2008 voter-approved measure defining marriage as only between one man and one woman violated the Constitution's guarantees of equal protection and due process.

"The founders of this nation said in the preamble to the United States Constitution that a goal was to secure the blessings of liberty to themselves and their posterity. Liberty has come more slowly for some than for others," he wrote in a 33-page opinion covering two cases, noting that it took the Supreme Court 200 years to invalidate laws prohibiting interracial marriage.

"When observers look back 50 years from now, the arguments supporting Florida's ban on same-sex marriage, though just as sincerely held, will again seem an obvious pretext for discrimination. Observers who are not now of age will wonder just how those views could have been held," Hinkle declared.

The ruling, which also applies to same-sex marriages performed in other states, followed similar decisions by Florida judges in four counties. The state attorney general has appealed those decisions and will challenge Hinkle's order.

In a friend-of-the-court brief supporting the state's ban, the Florida Conference of Catholic Bishops argued it "has a strong interest in protecting the traditional institution of husband-wife marriage because of the religious beliefs of its members and due to this institution's benefits to children, families and society."

In a statement, the bishops said they were "sadly disappointed by the court's decision to reject marriage as the union of only one man and one woman as husband and wife." They argued the decision "fails to adequately consider that marriage unites a man and a woman with any children born from their union and protects a child's right to both a mother and a father."

The bishops said their belief in heterosexual marriage "is not motivated by unjust discrimination or animosity toward anyone. Human dignity is manifested in all persons; and all have the capacity for and are deserving of love. This is especially true of children, who should be given the opportunity, to the greatest extent possible, to be raised and loved by the mother and father who conceived them."

Hinkle issued his opinion in Brenner v. Scott and Grimsley v. Scott a day after the U.S. Supreme Court intervened to prevent same-sex couples from marrying in Virginia after a federal appeals court struck down the state's voter-approved ban in July.

Attorneys general in Virginia, Utah and Oklahoma have asked the justice to pass final judgment on whether states can prohibit same-sex couples from marrying.

Since the Supreme Court struck down a portion of the Defense of Marriage Act last year, 20 federal courts have ruled that bans on same-sex marriage are unconstitutional, Hinkle noted.

"Based on these decisions, gays and lesbians, like all other adults, may choose a life partner anddignify the relationship through marriage," he wrote. "To paraphrase a civil rights leader from the age when interracial marriage was first struck down, the arc of history is long, but it bends toward justice."

Same-sex marriage is legal in 19 states and the District of Columbia.

More than 70 court challenges have been filed in 30 of 31 states, plus Puerto Rico, where same-sex marriage has been outlawed. Five federal appeal courts are reviewing cases from 11 states.

The U.S. Supreme Court stopped gay marriage in Virginia from going ahead today, staying an appeals court ruling that had struck down a state ban.

The court granted a stay application filed by opponents of gay marriage. The action was not a ruling on the merits of gay marriage, but means a July 28 pro-gay marriage ruling by the Richmond, Virginia-based 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals will not be implemented while litigation continues.

The high court issued its brief order less than 24 hours before gay and lesbian couples in Virginia could have begun applying to be married.

The Supreme Court issued a similar order in January blocking gay marriage from going ahead in Utah. So the court’s order on the Virginia law was not wholly unexpected.

The Supreme Court is expected to take up at least one case on gay marriage in its coming term, which starts in October and ends in June. There are already three case the justices can choose from pending at the court. They involve fights over the bans in Virginia, Utah and Oklahoma.

Michele McQuigg, Prince William County clerk of court, had filed the Virginia stay application last week seeking to prevent the appeals court ruling from going into effect.

“The Supreme Court acted wisely in restraining the lower court from implementing a ruling of this magnitude before the high court has a chance to decide the issue,” Byron Babione, a lawyer for McQuigg, said in a statement.

The state’s Democratic attorney general, Mark Herring, who backs gay marriage, and opponents of same-sex marriage have already said they would like the Supreme Court to be have the ultimate say in the case. Herring had backed the call for the delay of the lower court ruling.

Since a June 2013 ruling in the United States v. Windsor case struck down a federal law defining marriage as between one man and one woman, nearly 30 federal and state courts have ruled against bans on same-sex marriage at the state level. Only one court in the past 14 months has ruled in favor of a state ban.

Nineteen of the 50 U.S. states and the District of Columbia allow same-sex marriage.

The religious left's long-running campaign to silence those with different views has moved aggressively into corporate boardrooms. CEOs and directors of public companies are being hectored by social justice activists to abandon lobbying and other political activities.

Let's hope they don't succeed. Our political life would be impoverished and unbalanced by muzzling corporations whose interests go far beyond the boardroom to number millions of employees, shareholders, and community members. The cravenly political ploy of dressing up a progressive campaign to silence dissent with religious sentiment and Scripture proof texts brings honest religious witness into disrepute.

A newly issued critique of the role of money in politics titled "Losing Faith in Our Democracy" by the New York-based Auburn Theological Seminary is a case in point. The report ostensibly presents Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish viewpoints on money and politics. Yet the 10 essays in the critique -- with one notable exception -- simply rehash the religious left's talking points about corporate spending and the alleged harm it does to American democracy.

Every annual meeting season, we watch as a small group of activist groups on the left such as As You Sow and the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility submit proxy resolutions that demand disclosures of corporate public policy expenditures. This is done, these groups claim, in furtherance of a more "just and sustainable world." In fact, such resolutions are designed to first bully corporations into disclosing lobbying activities and then promptly turn the tables by conducting aggressive campaigns in the press to shame them.

But the religious underpinnings for such arguments are spurious. The argument always goes that corporations have money and the poor and disadvantaged (always "disenfranchised" from the political process) do not. Therefore, according to this logic, it follows that it's unfair that corporations are allowed to make public policy expenditures to unduly influence the political process. Curiously, opponents of such spending are often themselves corporate entities (albeit non-profit entities) that spend large sums of money to voice their own opinions.

The religious left should heed the counsel of William Cavanaugh, a senior research professor at the Center for World Catholicism and Intercultural Theology at DePaul University in Chicago. In his white paper for Auburn Seminary's very own critique of corporate political spending, Cavanaugh identifies Biblical precedents for corporate personhood. Adam and Christ, he points out, incorporate the whole human race. This, he says, shows that personhood properly understood cannot be limited to the individual. Likewise, writes Cavanaugh, "Paul's image of the Church as the body of Christ (e.g. I Corinthians 12) is so powerful; our salvation is our reunification into the corporate person of Christ."

Civil society, says Cavanaugh, requires us all to speak "with united voices. Unions, families, churches, and other organizations of people must remain strong in order to resist the reduction of public life to a binary of the state on the one hand and individuals on the other." And the same holds for businesses, especially as the power of government regulatory agencies grows exponentially and leftist billionaires like the Steyer brothers increasingly exercise their own First Amendment rights. (I searched in vain for them in the Auburn report.)

Another report, this one from the Center for Competitive Politics, a Virginia-based First Amendment advocacy group, deftly reveals the activists' questionable strategies, funding and end game. The Center notes that many of these social justice activists couch their resolutions in language advocating the best interests of the company's shareholders. Not surprisingly, CCP concludes, these arguments for political disclosure are "in actuality pursuing an ideological agenda unrelated to the profit-maximizing interest of most shareholders." CCP identifies these gadflies as a "cadre of unions, public pension funds, and activist investors...pursuing actions that would selectively burden American public companies from exercising their First Amendment rights to participate in public dialogue."

The political process only works when all sides are allowed to freely express themselves, a right guaranteed by our Constitution. This is an argument that must be made from secular and spiritual perspectives. Targeting the free speech of political adversaries, under a smoke screen of pious outrage, is not only unjust but immoral.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of other countries. The only real difference, however, is how much power they have. In America, their power is limited by democracy. To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges. They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did: None. So look to the colleges to see what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way. It would be a dictatorship.

Tuesday, August 26, 2014

This is no time to avert our gaze

by Jeff Jacoby

SCARCELY HAD ISIS posted its video showing the grisly beheading of American journalist James Foley than the rush to stifle it began.

"Don't watch the video. Don't share it. That's not how life should be," entreated Foley's sister Kelly in a message on Twitter that was heavily retweeted. Thousands of social media users, some of them journalists, called for an #ISISMediaBlackout — the hashtag quickly went viral — and Twitter CEO Dick Costolo announced that the company was "actively suspending accounts as we discover them related to this graphic imagery." YouTube removed versions of the video posted on its site, invoking its policy on "gratuitous violence, hate speech, and incitement to commit violent acts."

Most mainstream news organizations chose not to show or link to the sickening videos, or to publish still photos showing Foley being beheaded. One exception was the New York Post, which ran a front-page picture showing the journalist just as the knife was put to his throat, with the one-word headline: "SAVAGES." For doing so, the paper was vehemently criticized. Buzzfeed editor Adam Serwer echoed the widespread view that to publicize the gruesome image was to give the terrorists more of the notoriety they crave. "Pretty sure ISIS could not be happier with the New York Post's front page today," he tweeted.

Would that have been Foley's reaction? Would he have clamored for self-censorship and a media blackout? Or would he have wanted decent people everywhere to know — and, yes, to see — the crimes being committed by the ruthlessly indecent killers calling themselves the Islamic State?

The intrepid and compassionate reporter from New Hampshire didn't travel to Syria to sanitize and downplay the horror occurring there. He went to document and expose it. The 4-minute, 40-second video that records the last moments of Foley's life may be slick jihadist propaganda designed to intimidate ISIS's enemies and recruit more zealots to its cause. But it is also a key piece of the news story that Foley risked everything to pursue. That story cost him his life. The least we can do is bear witness to the courage and dignity with which he met his awful end.

Anyone with a heart understands why Foley's anguished loved ones would want his murderers' gloating depravity to be suppressed. When the Wall Street Journal's Daniel Pearl was beheaded by Al-Qaeda in 2002, his family issued a similar plea. "We should remove all terrorist-produced murder scenes from our Web sites and agree to suppress such scenes in the future," urged Daniel's father, the scientist Judea Pearl, in a published essay.

But we will never prevail over an enemy as barbaric and totalitarian as the Islamic State if we avert our gaze from what it does to those it vanquishes. There are times when it is necessary to see the evil, not just to read or hear about it. Images, especially of man's inhumanity to man, can often convey truths and illuminate reality with an urgency that the best-chosen words cannot match. It would have been unthinkable for the media to suppress the photos and video of the carnage at the Boston Marathon last year, or of the mutilated bodies of US soldiers being dragged through Mogadishu in 1993, or of Senator Robert Kennedy's assassination at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles in 1968. In a similar vein, jurors in the Whitey Bulger trial weren't just told what the gangster did to his victims. They were shown the ghastly crime-scene photos.

Granted, social networks like Twitter and Facebook are under no obligation to provide a platform for the unmediated ravings of terrorists and psychopaths. As private companies, they have every right to enforce standards of taste, safety, and the public interest. So, of course, do news organizations, which have wrestled with such dilemmas for many years. There is no universal litmus test that can always distinguish what is vital and newsworthy from what is mere gratuitous sensationalism.

But this isn't a close call. What was true of the video of Daniel Pearl's beheading is true of James Foley's. It is true of the other videos of mass-murder and beheadings that ISIS terrorists have been disseminating as their so-called caliphate metastasizes through Syria and Iraq. They clarify beyond all denial the utter monstrousness of an enemy we must destroy, or be destroyed by.

James Foley didn't hide from that unvarnished truth, and we shouldn't either.

An Englishman on holiday in Spain a century ago found a country with little to recommend it. Waking up on the first morning and consulting his guide book, he would have read the following description: ‘Spain is a bleak and often arid land, with few traces of picturesqueness.’

The towns, the guide continues, are wreathed in tobacco smoke and the cafes are ‘very deficient in comfort and cleanliness’. The guide further warns that the service from waiters, chambermaids and porters is generally very slack and that the traveller should always count his change.

In the Spanish countryside there is great danger of highway robbery, while in the cities the police will arrest anyone they can lay their hands on.

The railway carriages and omnibuses are so filthy that a clothes brush, a duster and some insect powder should always be at hand. As for the national sport of bull fighting, it is ‘the most unsportsmanlike and cowardly spectacle’ a civilised man will ever see.

This is the account of Spain given in the 1914 Baedeker Guide. These small, red books, bound in leather, were the first recourse for an Englishman abroad in the late 19th and early 20th century.

I came to Baedeker through my maternal grandfather, who amassed a collection of more than 130 of the red guides. He was possessed by a particularly keen sense of wanderlust, even into his 80s, and bought many hundreds of antique travel books.

The tone of the Baedeker guides is informed, detailed, authoritative — and riotously, unguardedly rude.

Alongside the city maps, ferry time-tables, and guides to churches, monuments and museums, there are unforgiving comments on the ‘natives’ a traveller might have the misfortune to encounter.

The Spanish are indolent, the Greeks filthy, the Italians dishonest and the ‘Orientals’ as stupid as children. The guides reflect an imperial attitude that would be unthinkable today.

For a century, Baedeker — founded in 1832 by German publisher Karl Baedeker — was the indispensable guide to Europe, the Middle East and beyond.

He prized himself on the accuracy of his books and was once discovered keeping count of how many stairs there were to the roof of Milan cathedral by placing a coin on every 20th step. He wanted his readers to know exactly how far they would have to climb.

By the outbreak of World War I, 992 editions of the guides had been published, covering Europe, Russia, North America, India and the Middle East.

After Germany, Britain was the biggest consumer of the books. It was the red Baedeker, small enough to fit in an overcoat pocket, which the British took as protection when they ventured abroad.

Today, many people know of Baedeker through reading or watching the film adaptation of E.M. Forster’s A Room With A View. In the opening chapters, our heroine Lucy Honeychurch (played in the film by Helena Bonham Carter) finds herself in Florence without a Baedeker.

The guide is supposed to be a shield against Italian passion and without its protective influence, Lucy finds herself being kissed by an Englishman made hot-blooded by the Tuscan sun.

The name was also made famous by the Baedeker Raids of World War II when the Germans targeted bombing campaigns over English cities such as Bath, Canterbury, and Norwich, singled out for their architectural beauty by Baedeker’s Guide To Great Britain. The aim was to depress morale by destroying our Regency terraces, cathedrals and medieval streets.

In return, the RAF razed Leipzig, demolishing the Baedeker HQ.

Reading the guides today you are struck by how patrician they are in their view of the world. These are books for travellers from the two great European imperial powers: Britain and Germany.

In an age before political correctness, it was possible to be really very rude indeed about foreigners. It is not just the Spanish who are liable to run off with your change. In Italy, according to my grand-father’s 1912 guide, extortion is the national hobby and begging the national plague. Customs officials unfailingly pilfer your luggage and the cab-drivers, boatmen and porters are insolent and rapacious to ‘an almost incredible pitch’.

The guide explains that while the ‘evil sanitary reputation of Naples’ is often exaggerated, it remains a filthy city. The southern Italians, Baedeker explains, believe the ‘brilliancy’ of their climate more than makes up for the dirt.

Travellers are advised to stay in hotels with iron bedsteads as these are less likely to be infested with the ‘enemies of repose’ — Baedeker’s dainty euphemism for bedbugs.

Still, the guide cheerfully concludes, things have improved greatly since the cholera epidemic of 1884, though travellers are advised not to order oysters as they have been known to cause typhus.

Greece is worse. The bedclothes at the inns are full of ‘fleas, bedbugs, lice . . . and other disgusting insects, winged and wingless’. You cannot even console yourself with a glass of wine for the Greek vintages are universally ‘insipid and weak’.

Tangiers market in Morocco is ‘an indescribable mass of Oriental humanity’; and in Egypt, any traveller who comes into contact with the natives ‘should avoid rubbing their eyes with their hands’.

You couldn’t get away with that in a Dorling Kindersley guide today.

Indeed, some of Baedeker’s advice will appal modern sensibilities. In Syria, you are advised to ward off stray dogs with an umbrella and in Egypt it is acceptable to hit a cab driver with your walking stick.

You are, however, advised to ‘sternly repress’ the urge to prod a donkey with a stick to encourage it to gallop. (The original owner of my grandfather’s 1914 Egypt guide, a C. Crampton from Harrogate, put an emphatic ‘X’ in the margin next to this advice.)

Overall, the poor Egyptians are given a hard time of it. The average native, explains Baedeker, is ‘no more intelligent than a child’.

Baedeker is not just guilty of terrible racial stereotypes. He also has a very dim view of the capabilities of women.

A female traveller is a delicate creature who cannot possibly manage certain activities. When it comes to climbing Mount Vesuvius, for example, a man may do it on foot, but as this is too ‘fatiguing’ for ladies, they are advised to take the train. I can say with great satisfaction that I managed it perfectly well as a 13-year-old schoolgirl.

Few countries escape Baedeker’s censure, although the Dutch are grudgingly admired for their cleanliness: ‘Spiders appear to be regarded with special aversion and vermin is fortunately as rare as cobwebs.’

Germany, of course, is beyond reproach. But what of Great Britain?

Certainly, we fare better than some countries. ‘As compared with Continental hotels,’ explains the 1927 guide, ‘British hotels may be said as a rule to excel in cleanliness and sanitary arrangements.’

So far so good, though the guide adds that some hotels can be tolerated by gentlemen, but certainly not by ladies.

Our cuisine is inferior and monotonous and the national dish, the guide remarks disparagingly, is tea with chips and steak.

As for the British themselves, Baedeker observes that the country is ‘a place of parsons, puppy dogs and peculiar people’.

After World War II, Baedekers disappeared from British shelves. Other guides such as Dorling Kindersley, the Lonely Planet and Time Out took their place.

Then, in 2007, the series was relaunched. The red covers remain, but they now come in wipe-clean, plastic jackets. Practical, but with none of the romance of my grandfather’s red leather hardbacks.

In tone they are indistinguishable from other guidebooks. There is nothing to match Baedeker’s sniffy comment on visiting large towns in England: ‘We need hardly caution newcomers against the artifices of pickpockets and wiles of impostors.’

Nor are they as evocative as the originals — for there are passages of lyrical description amid the scorpions and bedbugs. The scenery of Southern Greece, for example, is celebrated for ‘its mountains, its deep-blue gulfs and its clear, ethereal atmosphere which brings distant objects close to the beholder and robs shadows of their depth and gloom’.

While I don’t advocate a return to the days when Edwardian guides advised travellers to wash their hands if they so much as touched a foreigner, there is something refreshing about Baedeker’s acerbic comments on the food, hotels and manners of foreign climes.

This week, many of us will return from August holidays in France, Spain and Italy rather wishing someone had warned us that the local taxis smell like goat sheds, that the paella will make you desperately ill and that you cannot get a decent cup of Earl Grey anywhere in the Mediterranean.

Multiculturalism has resulted in honour killings, female genital mutilation and rule by Sharia law, a former Archbishop of Canterbury has claimed, as he called for Britons fighting with Isil to be “banished” from the country.

Lord Carey of Clifton said Muslim communities must “discipline” their young people or see them “banished” from Britain after leaving to fight in Syria and Iraq.

Islamic leaders in Britain have failed to clearly denounce religious fanatics in the wake of the murder of James Foley by a suspected British jihadist, he suggested.

Britain must “recover a confidence in our nation’s values”, Lord Carey wrote in the Mail on Sunday.

“For too long we have been self-conscious and even ashamed about British identity. By embracing multiculturalism and the idea that every culture and belief is of equal value we have betrayed our own traditions of welcoming strangers to our shore.

“In Britain's hospitable establishment different beliefs were welcomed but only one was preeminent - Christianity. The fact is that for too long the doctrine of multiculturalism has led to immigrants establishing completely separate communities in our cities. This has led to honour killings, female genital circumcision and the establishment of sharia law in inner-city pockets throughout the UK.”

Islamic radicals should be challenged with the values of liberal democracy, he said.

“In this must involve the power and co-operation of Muslim communities who need to state, more clearly than they have done so far, their denunciation of these fanatical forms of Islam.”

British Muslims preparing to travel abroad to commit terrorist acts, and those who have already travelled to the Middle East to fight, should be stripped of their passports, the Archbishop says.

“Young people who travel abroad to commit violent Jihad should know before they go that there is no way back to civilised society. It may focus their minds to know that the privileges and luxuries of our country (including our gyms, games consoles and relative peacefulness) will be denied to them in future.”

Lord Carey added: “Muslim communities are being challenged as never before to discipline their young people or face the consequences that such radicalised young men will be banished from our shores.”

Theresa May, the Home Secretary, currently has the power to strip citizenship from dual nationals, or from immigrants who have become naturalised citizens and are now fighting overseas.

However, Home Office lawyers argue that it is illegal for a country to make their citizens stateless.

A young woman with very "incorrect" conservative views is an active supporter of the UK Independence party

Whether it's their views on immigration or admiration of Adolf Hitler, UKIP politicians are never far from controversy.

Now a new supporter has spoken out in an attempt to refresh the image of her beloved party, although she may not have been entirely successful.

UKIP follower Laura Howard has given an interview to The Debrief in which she said she hopes to debunk the myth that the party is a just 'bunch of old white men'.

But in doing so, the 19-year-old student nurse from Birmingham could enrage many with her anti-feminist sentiments.

She told Rosamund Urwin that she's against modern feminism because 'it’s gone almost beyond equality: they want women to have more rights than men. They want quotas for women in businesses and I don't agree with that.'

She believes it isn't sex discrimination preventing women taking on more highly paid, powerful roles but their own life choices.

'I think the main reason behind that is that women want to have children and a family life,' she said of the male domination of company boards.

She added that politics is also male dominated not because of a lack of opportunities for her gender, but because women are simply not as interested in it.

'If you look at someone like Theresa May, she's a really well-established politician. I just think women aren't as interested as sad as that is,' she said.

The outspoken teenager's opinions echo those of UKIP leader Nigel Farage who said earlier this year that mothers are 'worth less' to employers in the City than men.

He said that women can succeed in the industry as long as they are willing to 'sacrifice the family life'.

Laura has been campaigning for UKIP for the last two years and stood to be a councillor in Quinton in Birmingham.

She has ambitions to one day run for parliament and her converts to the party so far include many of her own family members.

Where they once supported the Conservatives and Labour, she's now persuaded her parents and grandparents to vote UKIP.

She said it was the party's animal rights and EU stance that attracted her to them.

'I am anti-the EU because I'm pro-democracy,' she says.

She adds that she doesn't think of UKIP as far right but 'just something different.'

The student believes the party has much to offer people her age as 'immigration affects jobs and house prices - those are things that really affect young people today.'

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of other countries. The only real difference, however, is how much power they have. In America, their power is limited by democracy. To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges. They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did: None. So look to the colleges to see what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way. It would be a dictatorship.

Background

The most beautiful woman in the world? I think she was. Yes: It's Agnetha Fältskog

A beautiful baby is king -- with blue eyes, blond hair and white skin. How incorrect can you get?

Kristina Pimenova, once said to be the most beautiful girl in the world. Note blue eyes and blonde hair

Enough said

A face of Leftist hate: Cory Booker, (D-NJ)

There really is an actress named Donna Air. She seems a pleasant enough woman, though

What feminism has wrought:

There's actually some wisdom there. The dreamy lady says she is holding out for someone who meets her standards. The other lady reasonably replies "There's nobody there". Standards can be unrealistically high and feminists have laboured mightily to make them so

Some bright spark occasionally decides that Leftism is feminine and conservatism is masculine. That totally misses the point. If true, how come the vote in American presidential elections usually shows something close to a 50/50 split between men and women? And in the 2016 Presidential election, Trump won 53 percent of white women, despite allegations focused on his past treatment of some women.

Political correctness is Fascism pretending to be manners

Political Correctness is as big a threat to free speech as Communism and Fascism. All 3 were/are socialist.

The problem with minorities is not race but culture. For instance, many American black males fit in well with the majority culture. They go to college, work legally for their living, marry and support the mother of their children, go to church, abstain from crime and are considerate towards others. Who could reasonably object to such people? It is people who subscribe to minority cultures -- black, Latino or Muslim -- who can give rise to concern. If antisocial attitudes and/or behaviour become pervasive among a group, however, policies may reasonably devised to deal with that group as a whole

Black lives DON'T matter -- to other blacks. The leading cause of death among young black males is attack by other young black males

Leftist logic: There are allegedly no distinctions between groups of humans, yet we're still supposed to celebrate diversity.

Identity politics is a form of racism

'White Privilege'. .. Oh yes. .. That was abundant in the Irish potato famines. ... And in the Scottish Highland Clearances. ...And in transportations to Australia. ... And in Workhouses. ... 'White privilege' was absolutely RIFE!

Psychological defence mechanisms such as projection play a large part in Leftist thinking and discourse. So their frantic search for evil in the words and deeds of others is easily understandable. The evil is in themselves. Leftist motivations are fundamentally Fascist. They want to "fundamentally transform" the lives of their fellow citizens, which is as authoritarian as you can get. We saw where it led in Russia and China. The "compassion" that Leftists parade is just a cloak for their ghastly real motivations

Occasionally I put up on this blog complaints about the privileged position of homosexuals in today's world. I look forward to the day when the pendulum swings back and homosexuals are treated as equals before the law. To a simple Leftist mind, that makes me "homophobic", even though I have no fear of any kind of homosexuals.

But I thought it might be useful for me to point out a few things. For a start, I am not unwise enough to say that some of my best friends are homosexual. None are, in fact. Though there are two homosexuals in my normal social circle whom I get on well with and whom I think well of.

Of possible relevance: My late sister was a homosexual; I loved Liberace's sense of humour and I thought that Robert Helpmann was marvellous as Don Quixote in the Nureyev ballet of that name.

One may say that the person who gets in trouble with drugs is just as dumb without them

I record on this blog many examples of negligent, inefficient and reprehensible behaviour on the part of British police. After 13 years of Labour party rule they have become highly politicized, with values that reflect the demands made on them by the political Left rather than than what the community expects of them. They have become lazy and cowardly and avoid dealing with real crime wherever possible -- preferring instead to harass normal decent people for minor infractions -- particularly offences against political correctness. They are an excellent example of the destruction that can be brought about by Leftist meddling.

I also record on this blog much social worker evil -- particularly British social worker evil. The evil is neither negligent nor random. It follows exactly the pattern you would expect from the Marxist-oriented indoctrination they get in social work school -- where the middle class is seen as the enemy and the underclass is seen as virtuous. So social workers are lightning fast to take children away from normal decent parents on the basis of of minor or imaginary infractions while turning a blind eye to gross child abuse by the underclass

The genetics of crime: I have been pointing out for some time the evidence that there is a substantial genetic element in criminality. Some people are born bad. See here, here, here, here (DOI: 10.1111/jcpp.12581) and here, for instance"

Gender is a property of words, not of people. Using it otherwise is just another politically correct distortion -- though not as pernicious as calling racial discrimination "Affirmative action"

Postmodernism is fundamentally frivolous. Postmodernists routinely condemn racism and intolerance as wrong but then say that there is no such thing as right and wrong. They are clearly not being serious. Either they do not really believe in moral nihilism or they believe that racism cannot be condemned!

Postmodernism is in fact just a tantrum. Post-Soviet reality in particular suits Leftists so badly that their response is to deny that reality exists. That they can be so dishonest, however, simply shows how psychopathic they are.

So why do Leftists say "There is no such thing as right and wrong" when backed into a rhetorical corner? They say it because that is the predominant conclusion of analytic philosophers. And, as Keynes said: "Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back”

Juergen Habermas, a veteran leftist German philosopher stunned his admirers not long ago by proclaiming, "Christianity, and nothing else, is the ultimate foundation of liberty, conscience, human rights, and democracy, the benchmarks of Western civilization. To this day, we have no other options [than Christianity]. We continue to nourish ourselves from this source. Everything else is postmodern chatter."

Consider two "jokes" below:

Q. "Why are Leftists always standing up for blacks and homosexuals?

A. Because for all three groups their only God is their penis"

Pretty offensive, right? So consider this one:

Q. "Why are evangelical Christians like the Taliban?

A. They are both religious fundamentalists"

The latter "joke" is not a joke at all, of course. It is a comparison routinely touted by Leftists. Both "jokes" are greatly offensive and unfair to the parties targeted but one gets a pass without question while the other would bring great wrath on the head of anyone uttering it. Why? Because political correctness is in fact just Leftist bigotry. Bigotry is unfairly favouring one or more groups of people over others -- usually justified as "truth".

One of my more amusing memories is from the time when the Soviet Union still existed and I was teaching sociology in a major Australian university. On one memorable occasion, we had a representative of the Soviet Womens' organization visit us -- a stout and heavily made-up lady of mature years. When she was ushered into our conference room, she was greeted with something like adulation by the local Marxists. In question time after her talk, however, someone asked her how homosexuals were treated in the USSR. She replied: "We don't have any. That was before the revolution". The consternation and confusion that produced among my Leftist colleagues was hilarious to behold and still lives vividly in my memory. The more things change, the more they remain the same, however. In Sept. 2007 President Ahmadinejad told Columbia university that there are no homosexuals in Iran.

It is widely agreed (with mainly Lesbians dissenting) that boys need their fathers. What needs much wider recognition is that girls need their fathers too. The relationship between a "Daddy's girl" and her father is perhaps the most beautiful human relationship there is. It can help give the girl concerned inner strength for the rest of her life.

A modern feminist complains: "We are so far from “having it all” that “we barely even have a slice of the pie, which we probably baked ourselves while sobbing into the pastry at 4am”."

Patriotism does NOT in general go with hostilty towards others. See e.g. here and here and even here ("Ethnocentrism and Xenophobia: A Cross-Cultural Study" by anthropologist Elizabeth Cashdan. In Current Anthropology Vol. 42, No. 5, December 2001).

The love of bureaucracy is very Leftist and hence "correct". Who said this? "Account must be taken of every single article, every pound of grain, because what socialism implies above all is keeping account of everything". It was V.I. Lenin

"An objection I hear frequently is: ‘Why should we tolerate intolerance?’ The assumption is that tolerating views that you don’t agree with is like a gift, an act of kindness. It suggests we’re doing people a favour by tolerating their view. My argument is that tolerance is vital to us, to you and I, because it’s actually the presupposition of all our freedoms. You cannot be free in any meaningful sense unless there is a recognition that we are free to act on our beliefs, we’re free to think what we want and express ourselves freely. Unless we have that freedom, all those other freedoms that we have on paper mean nothing" -- SOURCE

Although it is a popular traditional chant, the "Kol Nidre" should be abandoned by modern Jewish congregations. It was totally understandable where it originated in the Middle Ages but is morally obnoxious in the modern world and vivid "proof" of all sorts of antisemitic stereotypes

What the Bible says about homosexuality:

"Thou shalt not lie with mankind as with womankind; It is abomination" -- Lev. 18:22

In his great diatribe against the pagan Romans, the apostle Paul included homosexuality among their sins:

"For this cause God gave them up unto vile affections: for even their women did change the natural use into that which is against nature. And likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust one toward another; men with men working that which is unseemly, and receiving in themselves that recompence of their error which was meet.... Who knowing the judgment of God, that they which commit such things are worthy of death, not only do the same, but have pleasure in them that do them" -- Romans 1:26,27,32.

So churches that condone homosexuality are clearly post-Christian

Although I am an atheist, I have great respect for the wisdom of ancient times as collected in the Bible. And its condemnation of homosexuality makes considerable sense to me. In an era when family values are under constant assault, such a return to the basics could be helpful. Nonetheless, I approve of St. Paul's advice in the second chapter of his epistle to the Romans that it is for God to punish them, not us. In secular terms, homosexuality between consenting adults in private should not be penalized but nor should it be promoted or praised. In Christian terms, "Gay pride" is of the Devil

The homosexuals of Gibeah (Judges 19 & 20) set in train a series of events which brought down great wrath and destruction on their tribe. The tribe of Benjamin was almost wiped out when it would not disown its homosexuals. Are we seeing a related process in the woes presently being experienced by the amoral Western world? Note that there was one Western country that was not affected by the global financial crisis and subsequently had no debt problems: Australia. In September 2012 the Australian federal parliament considered a bill to implement homosexual marriage. It was rejected by a large majority -- including members from both major political parties. The tide turned in 2017, however, with a public vote authorizing homosexual marriage in Australia

Religion is deeply human. The recent discoveries at Gobekli Tepe suggest that it was religion not farming that gave birth to civilization. Early civilizations were at any rate all very religious. Atheism is mainly a very modern development and is even now very much a minority opinion

"Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter!" - Isaiah 5:20 (KJV)

I think it's not unreasonable to see Islam as the religion of the Devil. Any religion that loves death or leads to parents rejoicing when their children blow themselves up is surely of the Devil -- however you conceive of the Devil. Whether he is a man in a red suit with horns and a tail, a fallen spirit being, or simply the evil side of human nature hardly matters. In all cases Islam is clearly anti-life and only the Devil or his disciples could rejoice in that.

And there surely could be few lower forms of human behaviour than to give abuse and harm in return for help. The compassionate practices of countries with Christian traditions have led many such countries to give a new home to Muslim refugees and seekers after a better life. It's basic humanity that such kindness should attract gratitude and appreciation. But do Muslims appreciate it? They most commonly show contempt for the countries and societies concerned. That's another sign of Satanic influence.

And how's this for demonic thinking?: "Asian father whose daughter drowned in Dubai sea 'stopped lifeguards from saving her because he didn't want her touched and dishonoured by strange men'

Islamic terrorism isn’t a perversion of Islam. It’s the implementation of Islam. It is not a religion of the persecuted, but the persecutors. Its theology is violent supremacism.

And where Muslims tell us that they love death, the great Christian celebration is of the birth of a baby -- the monogenes theos (only begotten god) as John 1:18 describes it in the original Greek -- Christmas!

No wonder so many Muslims are hostile and angry. They have little companionship from women and not even any companionship from dogs -- which are emotionally important in most other cultures. Dogs are "unclean"

On all my blogs, I express my view of what is important primarily by the readings that I select for posting. I do however on occasions add personal comments in italicized form at the beginning of an article.

I am rather pleased to report that I am a lifelong conservative. Out of intellectual curiosity, I did in my youth join organizations from right across the political spectrum so I am certainly not closed-minded and am very familiar with the full spectrum of political thinking. Nonetheless, I did not have to undergo the lurch from Left to Right that so many people undergo. At age 13 I used my pocket-money to subscribe to the "Reader's Digest" -- the main conservative organ available in small town Australia of the 1950s. I have learnt much since but am pleased and amused to note that history has since confirmed most of what I thought at that early age.

I imagine that the the RD is still sending mailouts to my 1950s address!

Germaine Greer is a stupid old Harpy who is notable only for the depth and extent of her hatreds

There are also two blogspot blogs which record what I think are my main recent articles here and here. Similar content can be more conveniently accessed via my subject-indexed list of short articles here or here (I rarely write long articles these days)

Note: If the link to one of my articles is not working, the article concerned can generally be viewed by prefixing to the filename the following: http://pandora.nla.gov.au/pan/42197/20121106-1520/jonjayray.comuv.com/

NOTE: The archives provided by blogspot below are rather inconvenient. They break each month up into small bits. If you want to scan whole months at a time, the backup archives will suit better. See here or here